[braz]

I wanted to share this with people here at pinstack. I was on a mission to have my Google Calendar sync via OTA. Since I am not on a BES I was looking for a free or low cost option to do this. I have seen other app that never really worked and thought I would begin to search for something else.

Well I am pleased to say that I came accross this app called Calendar Share from www.saraiya.com. Now let me first start off by saying I dont know this company. I am no way connected to them. I just wanted to pass on something that seems to be working great for me, atleast for the last few days as I'm still running the demo.

Here is a brief quote from their site:

CalendarShare for Partners and Secretaries
Share your handheld's calendar with your spouse, your secretary, your colleagues or your friends over the air for a one-time charge. The other party doesn't have to have the same kind of handheld, or even a handheld at all (all that is necessary is a Google Calendar). You can also

• hide or anonymize some events, e.g. a doctor's appointments with patients
• view other people's handheld or Google calendars on your handheld, and show or hide them at will
• import other Google Calendars, such as Holidays or the schedule of your favorite sports team.
• import events for your city, e.g. music concerts in your city, and show or hide them at will

Setup was very simple took me about 10 mins if that and all is syncing great!

I hope that others will find this info usefull. I have been looking for a long time for a simple soultion to this problem and I think I have finally found it.

Enjoy.

PS they support 87XX, 8100, 7130 I have no idea about 72xx.

PSS they also have the following apps incase your interested.

CalendarVoice for BlackBerry
Read out your appointments for the week through your speakerphone, using your bluetooth headset as a control. You can still make or receive phone calls.

CameraRemote for BlackBerry Pearl
Use your existing BlueTooth headset as a control for your BlackBerry Pearl's camera.

[cp6169]

Thats great news, thanks.

[redjim]

Have you used it?? How is it working for you?
~via BB (wap.pinstack.com)~

[braz]

~via BB (wap.pinstack.com)~redjim I have been using the trial for the last week and so far I'm impressed and can't find anything bad to say about it.

[phalpernnh]

I tried CalendarShare and decided to buy it. Credit-card payment is processed by Handango. You receive an activation key that you must enter into the setting screen.

I think CalendarShare works quite well, but it does have limitations. For example, it only synchronizes future events, not past events. You tell it how often to synchronize (default every 6 hours) and far into the future you want to synchronize (default 7 days). There have been reports of problems when trying to synchronize too far into the future, but I don't know how long "too far into the future" is. I set my BB to synchronize 90-days into the future on my primary calendar and the US Holidays calendar. I had no problems except that it took a few minutes to do the sync. I think I'll edge it up 30-days at a time until it either breaks or takes too long to sync. I'm hoping it can go a whole year into the future.

CalendarShare allows you to import multiple GCal calendars (e.g. your spouse's calendar, your boss's calendar, and several public calendars) but it merges the imported items into your single BB calendar application. Although each GCal entry is prefixed with the name of the calendar from which it was imported, CalendarShare does not allow you to selectively choose which calendars you want to view. It really would be better if someone created an application to allow multiple calendars on the BB, with the kind of selective view that you find on the Google Calendar web view. CalendarShare annotates each calendar entry with a little data that it uses to avoid duplicate items etc. One interesting consequence of the way that it works is that if your BlackBerry is synchronized with Outlook via BES, then your GCal items will appear in Outlook and Vice-versa. Your BB becomes the conduit for synchronizing Outlook and GCal! For some people, this may be a good thing, for others, a nuisance. Again, support for multiple calendars would be nice.

You can also read another post by me on a related thread here: 2763-sync_blackberry_w_google_calendar_gcalsync-2.html#post228189

[saraiya]

Hi,

This email from Google may be of interest to Google Calendar users.

We wanted to inform you that we are planning to conduct routine maintenance to Google Calendar between 8AM and 9PM on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 . During this time, this service may be unavailable to some of your users. Please inform your users about this planned maintenance appropriately. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we work to improve Google Calendar.

Nope, we don't have a clue as to what this is about.

[saraiya]

Hello,

We just released version 7.0 of the software for the BlackBerry. As before, upgrades for existing customers are free. Note that this will install a module called CalendarShareApp (not CalendarShare) on your BlackBerry. You will have to delete CalendarShare to run CalendarShareApp. It will preserve your software license key, but you may have to reenter some information.

To download and try, type the following into your BlackBerry browser (substituting symbols for words in the obvious way):

http colon slash slash www dot saraiya dot com slash CalendarShareBlackBerry slash otaApp.pl

The help file is at

http colon slash slash www dot saraiya dot com slash CalendarShareBlackBerry slash helpv7.html

Here are the relevant changes from the help file:

The major change in version 7 is the role of autosync.

* Autosync is now the only way to sync.
* Autosync runs completely in the background. You'll never see it.
* However, you can force a sync within 1 minute by going into Settings and choosing the Save menu item (even if you didn't change anything).
* Remember to turn Sync On in Settings, otherwise it won't sync at all.
* Rebooting your phone is no problem. Autosync will resume if you turned Sync On in Settings, or if you later turn Sync On in Settings.

[queritor]

Does this work with Google Apps, or only the free gmail accounts?

Right now I'm doing three way syncing using iCal with webdav to Exchange/BES to get it on my Blackberry, and then Spanning Sync to get iCal on my Google Apps calendar.

This solution seems a lot simpler and will eliminate Spanning Sync and the inherent delays in my current setup.

[saraiya]

Originally Posted by queritor Does this work with Google Apps, or only the free gmail accounts? Right now I'm doing three way syncing using iCal with webdav to Exchange/BES to get it on my Blackberry, and then Spanning Sync to get iCal on my Google Apps calendar. This solution seems a lot simpler and will eliminate Spanning Sync and the inherent delays in my current setup.

In our testing, it worked fine on our hosted account. If it does not work for you, please email support at saraiya dot com

[queritor]

For the record, I went ahead and purchased CalendarShare and it's working perfectly with my premier Google Apps account.

Now I just need something that will sync my Apple address book with my Exchange private contacts without having to open Entourage.

[saraiya]

If all you want to do is access your Google Calendar from your cell phone over the Web without transferring the data to your cell phone calendar, then you might want to try the solution that Google has just announced.

[saraiya]

That url is

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/...e-devices.html

[DesertBlade]

Will it work with a the primary email on a hosted domain?

[saraiya]

Originally Posted by DesertBlade Will it work with a the primary email on a hosted domain?

Are you talking about our product or Google's recent solution?

[sadelb]

what is the difference between your product and googles recent solution? Is it that googles you have to log on and yours does it automatically do blackberries calendar?

[DesertBlade]

Your product, It would be perfect if I could use it with my hosted domain. By the way the new Sync feature is nice.

Sadelb: Calendar share downloads the data from Google and places it into you BB calendar.

[russcrypto]

^^BUMP^^

I downloaded the trial (for the second time) two days ago. Just like the first time, I set up everything just as described on the help page. There has yet to be any syncs between my BB and my Google calendar.

Is there some special "fix" that is necessary to get this to work? I was really hoping to get this to work, because the idea is great. If it worked more seemlessly, I think there would be a huge market for it.

[PENorwood]

I have the same issue ... it is all set up but there doesn't seem to be any sync going on. With no actual log file I can't tell if there is an error or something going on.

[melissaox]

I seem to be having the same issue on my 8300. I set it up, it says it will synch, but nothing happens... no error messages, nothing.

Update - I just sent an email to thier support on the website.

[russcrypto]

~via BB (wap.pinstack.com)~

Well, after a couple days it decided to sync. There was only one successful entry synced and 9 errors.

[ziipppp]

I really really wanted to like this product. And after all the billing of "set it and forget it" it seemed to good to be true. It was.

It set up and worked pretty well - but then something strange happened I went to my GCal page and ALL the events over the sync period were wiped out. Ow. So I called them (they had been quite responsive) to see what was up and they said "it couldn't possibly have been our product, its not how it works, whatever happened it wasn't our fault" which seemed weird as the EXACT period of deletions was the period of syncing. But I was stuck.

So I decided to wipe my calendar and start over. Thats when I found that a bunch of calendar items gave me an error, something to do with an external viewer and not being able to be edited on the device. Ughgh. So then I basically reset my machine and started over.

But because this apps promise is so good I decided to reinstall (and purchase it, I might add). And I set the sync forward time for 30 days, and again it seemed to work well. But I need to plan more than 30 days out, so after about a month of testing (I was hoping to roll this out across my small business) I upped it to 90 days.

Next day I went to GCal and once again, my whole calendar was wiped. Which is terrifying. Then I started the app, looked at it and it said "70 deletions - successful" Successful for the app maybe. Disastrous for me. So I emailed them again August 30th but got not reply. I emailed them again September 7th to say "umm, I'm kind of in a pickle here, do you think you could tell me if you are working on this?" September 10th they wrote to say "we are investigating".

Its now September 18th and I haven't heard a thing.

In the meantime I tried to blank out my calendar and discovered those weird rogue "external viewer" calendar events that are undeletable by the BB. But I just don't have time to hard reset the whole system - so I'm living with them.

If you can make it work, it really is fabulous (deletions, and the odd duplicated event notwithstanding). But if you change the settings make sure you have everything backed up and be prepared for the odd random shock. As always, your mileage may vary.

I felt I had to warn others, as there are so many glowing reviews out there for CalendarShare - I did find one other person who wrote to say that he had mass deletions, but that conversation thread got closed.

Meanwhile if I can find an app that will do reliably what this one says it will do ie sync to the onboard agenda wirelessly, I have $20 to $50 x five users worth of budget. Let me know!

[BadTim]

Does anyone have any updates on this?

I read this thread with great interest hoping that I'd finally found a remedy for one of the most troublesome problems I've had with my new 8800 since I bought it. The company representative seemed keen to answer any and every post enthusiastically for a period of time but then categorically lost interest. Is this what has happened with their support as well?

I certainly don't want to install this app if it will wipe out my calendars!

Cheers